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Frank Harris

Frank Harris

This part of the site is dedicated to the notorious author and editor Frank Harris, whose My Life and Loves scandalised Britain, Europe and America in the 1920s. Notwithstanding his reputation as a rogue and womaniser, he was an entertaining writer and individual who was always his own man.

Latest Updates

After a recent upgrade to this site, the Frank Harris genealogy page disappeared. There was no mystery involved: the genealogy was displayed using a custom Drupal module which I wrote some while ago... Read more

Secret Information by Robert Hichens (1938) is a novel with a curious Frank Harris connection: rather than Harris being featured as a character, pseudonymously or otherwise, it is My Life and Loves... Read more

A correspondent of mine asked this question recently. The answer is to be found in Philippa Pullar's biography of Harris, where she says he was interred at the British Cemetery at Caucade, Nice -... Read more

Here's a curiosity: I was recently contacted by a man who works in an Oxfam bookshop in Bristol. The shop had come into possession of a set of The Ilustrated Dictionary of Gardening with four of the... Read more

He was notably outspoken and candid, which did not suit the tenor of the times, but it was the publication of his autobiography My Life and Loves which finally destroyed his reputation. This work immediately scandalised the society of his day with its unshrinking depiction of sexual matters, and it has remained one of those works like The Story of 'O' or Venus in Furs which are known better for their erotic content than for any other qualities.

Harris is one of those ambiguous figures of history of whom there are so many contradictory reports that to divine the truth is more a matter of psychological than historical analysis. He was a man whose talents were outstanding, but who was disabled by his own flaws from making full use of them. A man who idealised Jesus, Goethe, and Shakespeare, but played the role of rake and bounder so well that the role was almost universally mistaken for the man. A man who nearly became a Conservative M.P., yet who entertained romantic anarchist fantasies and talked of blowing up Gladstone with a bomb.

These pages attempt to document Harris, what he said and wrote, and what has been written about him, to bring him to a new public, and foster a balanced and sympathetic understanding of him. There are too many purported heroes being noised from every corner of the 'net: let us instead sing of one who was undoubtedly not a hero, but that greater treasure, a remarkable individual.